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And the Next Trip is…

The paperwork is mailed so I suppose it is official. My next trip will be to Tanzania, and it will be this fall. For the geographically challenged, Tanzania is south of Kenya, but in the same general region as my other African travels.

I’m a bit overwhelmed with the quick turn around for this trip. I was approached with the opportunity while in Honduras, and needed to submit some paperwork for my visa before returning home. Luckily, my husband and children were safely back in the apartment and could make copies of my nursing license, certifications, coursework and other details needed to secure a work visa.

That’s right, this time I am going under a work visa. In this trip I will be legal to use my skills. Better yet, this trip will count towards my experiences for nursing school. I will attend births in a busy public hospital in Tanzania to complete my necessary births for graduation. Honestly, I couldn’t think of a better way to use my clinical time in my last semester. Isn’t it ironic how I have devoted so many hours to hospital and birth center on call only to leave women laboring and not attend the actual birth…yet if I didn’t still have a few births to count for graduation it may not be as easy to get teachers to agree to my missing classes.

Yes, I’ll be missing classes. They will all be public health classes – I have completed my coursework for the masters in nursing. So I’ll miss two weeks of some of the most important classes I need and want to take – Biostats and management and evaluation. Good thing I’ve built my schedule with extra study time so I can work ahead.

My next step is to figure out how people can donate to this trip. Stay tuned for details.

Jennifer Vanderlaan CNM MPH is the author of the BirthingNaturally.net website. She has been working with expectant families since 2000, training doulas, childbirth educators, and midwives. She has worked with midwives in Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her interest in public health grew in 2010, and she is now a PhD student learning to become a producer of knowledge.